American Football: a violent, but very profitable adventure for those that don't play it.

Seeing Minnesota quarterback Bret Favre being carted off the field in the New England game with a laceration to his jaw reminded me of the violent nature of American football. Rugby supporters will often point out with macho pride, that Rugby players don’t wear padding and all that, but this is not a fair comparison; American football is a much more violent game.

Capitalism makes commodities out of everything, music, art, sport; we know this. Sport is theirs to sell to us, not ours to enjoy and play. They only support community sports as factories for potential sources of profit.  Sports figures are commodities, turned in to gods that we watch each week. People buy shirts with their names on them or their numbers; the  few stars make lots of money selling other commodities for capitalists including clothes, junk food and cars.

But like boxing, for every Muhammad Ali there are thousands of others we never hear of that end up with broken bodies, brain damage and, especially in the US, no medical care. Ali himself, one of the most successful, paid a dear price for his success; rich people’s kids don’t look to boxing for a career, they own the rights to those that do, the ones that are successful that it anyway.

Here is a description of what concussion really is:
"Contrary to popular belief, a concussion is not a bruise to the brain caused by hitting a hard surface. Indeed, no physical swelling or bleeding is usually seen on radiological scans. The injury generally occurs when the head either accelerates rapidly and then is stopped, or is spun rapidly.
This violent shaking causes the brain cells to become depolarized and fire all their neurotransmitters at once in an unhealthy cascade, flooding the brain with chemicals and deadening certain receptors linked to learning and memory."

When the football players went on strike in 1982 and 87, I remember a lot of people saying that these were overpaid whiners and often showed little sympathy for them. I always pointed out that when workers, even high paid ones, strike against their working conditions, we must take the side of the worker.

I learned a lot during those strikes about the conditions of the game, the short life span and the destruction to their bodies. I had no idea that artificial turf was so damaging for them but it was cheaper for the owners. The film and book, North Dallas Forty was also a good look in to the industry. And once again, head injuries, a concern for years, are shifting to the front burner in the light of further investigation and complaints from players.

“Going in to the tunnel on the cart” Business Week reports Favre as saying, “I thought to myself for a brief second, What in the world am I doing?” (1)

The average career length for an American Football player is three and a half years. There have been 415 players over the last four years unable to play due to injuries. The players have won some medical benefits; they receive five years benefits after leaving the game, but get this, only after completing three seasons of play. If the average life span is three and a half seasons, there must be a lot of folks who don’t get that benefit.

The multi-millionaires and billionaire consortium's that own the teams are in negotiations with the player’s group and they are eager to extend the season by two games. The Union points out that this would add an extra half season to the requirement for post play benefits while increasing the injury rate.

These individuals and consortium's that own sports franchises are scum. We see them on TV, in their boxes as if they’re interested in the actual sport. They are portrayed as great civic figures. They have resisted every attempt by the players Union to make the game safer or look after the health of the player. The Union’s record is not much different than the employers when it comes to looking after the health of the players. The case of John Mackey is a good example. He was a star of the game that now suffers from brain damage, Frontotemporal Dementia to be exact. The owners abandoned him and the player’s Union refused to pay any disability to him because at the time there was no proven link between brain injury and playing football.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I’m thinking about tobacco and lung cancer. But like big tobacco, the owners hired their own doctors to cover for them and naturally they found no link. One of them, a Dr. Ira Casson, a co-chair of the league’s committee on brain injuries was eventually forced to resign. (2). Workers go to Pelican Bay for less. “The league and the NFL Players' Association were almost shamed into coming up with a program that was named after Mackey's number. It provides $88,000-a-year for nursing home care and up to $50,000 annually for adult day care.”, writes Evan Weiner of the Examiner, but points out that this was a small percentage of the victims, “There are so many who have fallen through the cracks and depend on government programs to pay their medical bills.”, he adds. (3)

A September 2009 study found that Alzheimer's and other “memory related” diseases are found in retired football players at 19 times the normal rate for men 30 through 49.

I remember reading an account a long time ago by a visitor to China who went to a local soccer game. There were about 15,000 fans there. No players were paid and there was no cost to watch

Healthy competitive sport is a necessary part of human society. Sport, music, and indeed, production (work) itself is an integral part of human society. In a genuinely free society it is not likely such violent sports like American Football and Boxing would continue; the sons of the hedge fund managers who are making a billion dollars a year have other choices; they don’t need to play them.

I stopped watching boxing a long time ago after reading about how Alexis Arguello was treated and seeing his head spring back after Aaron Pryor landed one on his chin. I despise these fight spectacles where working class men are in cages beating each other up.  I don’t watch football much but I am considering not watching it at all but I do enjoy it. But safety in any job, the production line, the construction site, or the football field will always take second place to profit. The owners of the team are not in it for the sport, they are in it for the money. They could just as well own a cannery.

I couldn’t put it any clearer than Marx when he wrote about work in under capitalism:
“A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”

(1) The NFL’s Pain Paradox: Business Week, 11-8-10
(2) Concussions and Head Injuries in Football, NY Times 11-7-10
(3) Examiner.com